Smart Photo Import

With so many options for importing your digital photos into your PC?including the one built into the operating system?why would you pay for a separate app for the job? If you do a Web search for "photo import software," Smart Photo Import always shows up at or near the top, and even more than once for download sites that offer it. So I thought I'd take it for a spin. Nothing in the experience really answered the above question in a convincing way.

Smart Import's site claims that it's not just intended for getting new photos from your camera media: It's also about organizing photo files already scattered around your hard drive. And beyond just photos from cameras, it can also use WIA (Windows Image Acquisition) to acquire images from scanners.

Setup/Signup
Smart Photo Import costs 13 euros, or about $18 USD, but you can download and install it as a full-featured free trial. And there's no time limit; paying for the registration just gets you priority support and more comprehensive documentation.

Interface
The app's interface has a shiny chrome-like look that was fashionable among program skins several years ago. You can change the design from the Skin menu to two different choices, though they don't change the look of the buttons. A standard menu bar across the top offers File, View, Action, Tools, Skin, and Help choices. Below are two tab options for PC Drive and WIA (for scanner input).

Functionality
As you'd expect, Smart Photo Import adds an entry to the AutoPlay option that pops up when you insert camera media into a USB slot. Clicking this button populates the app's main window with thumbnails of the photos. You have quite a few options for how these thumbnails are displayed, dropdowns offer captioning by filename, date, size, title, author, and comments. A vertical slider lets you enlarge the thumbnails.

Double clicking on a thumbnail opens the full image. The program had no problem importing native raw image files from my Canon T1i , and it also supports the T2i, but the T3i and T4i aren't yet on its compatibility list. Adobe Camera Raw (used by Lightroom and Photoshop ) already supports those newer models. Also, loading full raw images was a bit slow. But Windows doesn't offer the raw import on its own, and the Adobe products cost considerably more.

When viewing images for import, you can sort by name, date, file size, or type. You can also filter the view to just files of certain types?raw, video, or a custom date range. You can rotate individual or all photos before importing them. You can also choose to have the photos renamed using a description and counter.

But there's quite a lot that you can't do, and that includes things you can do with Windows' included photo importer. You can't rate the photos or apply keyword tags to them. And the pro tools like Lightroom actually let you perform preset photo adjustments before import. And I didn't see any option to ignore duplicates during importing.

To actually import the photos to your PC, you click the COPY button, which can be switched to MOVE, if you don't want to keep the photos on the original media source. A dialog pops up telling you how many files you'll copy and to where, and you then can add a Subject for the folder name and hit CONFIRM.

To test, I tried copying 170 raw files of about 20MB each. During the import, I saw a series of progress bars, with no information as to what the current activity or file being imported was. At one point, I hit Esc to cancel, and to my surprise, there was no confirmation asking whether I really wanted to cancel, just an Aborted message box. Smart Photo Import took about the same amount of time as Windows picture import and Lightroom to import the 170 images?6:30 minutes. Smart Photo Import creates a folder structure under Documents (not Photos) in the format MyPhotos/2012/06/17/project name. Frankly, the free Windows photo importer does just as good a job of organizing created folders by date as Lightroom does.

Scanning with Smart Photo Import is no more intuitive and helpful than importing photos. It was able to turn on my scanner, but it really offered nothing over Windows Fax and Scan, which is actually clearer to use.

The Smartest Way to Import Photos?
Smart Photo Import is a program that probably has outlived its usefulness. Windows' built-in Import pictures and videos feature actually does at least as good a job, and if you're serious about digital photography, you'll get better import features from an app like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which offers even more import options and supports more raw camera file formats. But even free options like Picasa or Windows Photo Gallery offer more in the way of organizing your photos. Smart Photo Import does do everything it claims, and doesn't crash; I just can't recommend it when there are better, free options.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/GmUvgA-T7zI/0,2817,2410379,00.asp

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